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Saturday, February 16, 2013

`The Want of a Closer Union'

The padded
envelope was slender but inside I could feel something the size and shape of a silver
dollar. It was a button with a pin on the back and the face of Dr. Johnson on
the front. The image is black and white, shows Johnson from the neck up, with
his wig and white collar, and was taken from the portrait painted in 1772 by Johnson’s
friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds. The accompanying note is dated “Shrove Tuesday,
2013,” and was sent by a longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence who lives in Dallas.
His wife of thirty-three years died late last year:

“I found
this in my dresser drawer a day or two ago and thought you might like to have
it. I bought a number of lapel badges of this sort (various individuals, not
just Johnson) about thirty years ago for reasons I no longer recall. I don’t
think I ever wore any of them around. At the moment I find that it’s easier to
go through and dispose of [his wife’s] things if I get rid of some of my own as
well.”

Johnson married
Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter in 1735, when she was forty-six and he was twenty-five.
Johnson called their marriage “a love-match on both sides,”
and grieved for the rest of his life after her death in 1752. In a letter dated
Dec. 21, 1754, addressed to the poet Thomas Warton and reproduced by Boswell.
Johnson writes:

“I have
ever since [his wife's death] seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind
of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction, or fixed point
of view: a gloomy gazer on the world to which I have little relation. Yet I
would endeavor, by the help of you and your brother, to supply the want of a
closer union, by friendship: and hope to have long the pleasure of being, dear
Sir, most affectionately yours...”